A
female
age
51-59,
anonymous
writes:Hi, this is not really a relationship question as such, but it does really impact onto relationships I think.Is there anyone out there who has no family? I have no family as such - I was estranged from my immediate family in my early twenties because I started to question my parents' psychologically abusive behaviour/neglect and my family rejected me. In my early twenties my father died and then my mother died whilst I was in my early thirties. I have no aunts, uncles or cousins, no grandparents, only my daughter.When this comes up in conversation I long ago gave up trying to expect anyone to understand what it is like to never have a family to go to for birthdays. Xmas or to call on the phone - people just say "oh, your daughter is your family" - but the thing is, for a very, very long time now I've had no older family members looking out for me and vice versa.It's perhaps a bit more complicated because my memories of my family are extremely painful. Even when my parents were alive my mother was incredibly cold and neglectful and very psychologically abusive towards me. My father was very controlling and both of them had very explosive tempers, constantly arguing. My elder sister started having schizophrenic attacks at a young age and my parents totally failed to deal with her condition in any responsible way - I see now that as a young teenager this ruined my life, but at the time I only felt responsible for trying to help her and constantly blamed myself for feeling depressed - I honestly thought there was something very wrong with me and it wasn't until my early twenties that I realised that my parents had actually been psychologically abusive - and in my elder sister's case my father was physically abusive, often fighting with her - to the point where this had ruined both my elder sister's life and my own.Basically speaking my family put me in the position of doormat, with each one of them taking a huge amount of support and care from me, but actually treating me like dirt in different ways. I had to have counselling and CBT to overcome their ill treatment of me, particularly in the case of my mother. On the outside I am a very successful woman because I have worked incredibly hard, seeming to need to prove my self worth, but inside I feel this enormous emptiness and pain that there are no family members, ever, to relate to. In recent years I have found this especially different because I began to suffer from 'burn out' from pushing myself too hard. Ironically, people only ever seem to see me as talented and successful, no matter how hard I try to show my vulnerability to them or to remember to reach out and ask for help sometimes as well as giving it. In the past I had to work very hard through counselling to stop 'friends' literally using me as an emotional counsellor, always turning to me for support and understanding and then not giving anything back, even if I remember to communicate this rather then just not saying that I need help. It has left me very confused about friendships - people say "be the kind of friend that you would like others to be to you " - but I've found that I just end up getting used and, in a relationship scenario, have been absolutely treated like a doormat by both my ex husband and then my ex partner.Ironically, I have a younger sibling - 10 years - whom both parents lavished love and attention on, as if to prove that my sister and myself were 'evil' (as they claimed) and that they were in fact good parents. We were really close when she was younger because I was expected to look after her a lot and she genuinely loved me and I her - however, my mother became jealous of this bond and strove to turn my younger sister against me - she became extremely manipulative as a person and very used to always getting her own way, totally selfish. A relationship with her became impossible because she did things like totally ignored my own daughter since her birth and only ever looked to me to support her and her needs, treating me like a servant or a doormat and literally running to others and blaming me (as she did to my mother when she was alive) when I had done absolutely nothing wrong. I finally stopped contact with her when she turned on me after I gave her a huge amount of support when her husband died unexpectedly - we had not spoken for some years but I supported her nevertheless and then she turned on me as usual.The situation has made me very confused about future relationships with a partner - I don't want my partner to feel that they have to be 'everything' to me and I don't want to seem really needy; in the past I tended to hide any needs at all and had to learn, through counselling, to communicate when I needed help. Even so, I find that it is not easy to have a more reciprocal relationship with people, time and again I seem to find myself being used for support and then the same people are not there if I have any need at all.
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Fancy yourself as an agony aunt? Add your answer to this question! A
male
reader, peanut_gallery  +, writes (21 April 2013):
Perhaps something's going on subconsciously where you give too much in an attempt to gain that "unconditional" type family love from someone that isn't your family.
I would say your best chance of accomplishing this is by finding other people that feel this way and trying to connect with them. If they have very little or no family, there may be a greater chance of reciprocity.
On the other hand, think of two things:
1. All those that do have family but focus on creating problems for each other as opposed to working together
2. All those that have family but are far apart, cold and distant.
Everything is what we make it.
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